


In which John and Sherlock discuss a baby, Satan, and Dante

by DonnesCafe



Series: Aftermath [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Baby Boy Watson, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Light Angst, Relationship(s), and supernatural beings may or may not come into it, post-HLV, some schmoop, some serious stuff as well, temporary character death (past)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-05
Updated: 2014-03-05
Packaged: 2018-01-14 15:57:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1272496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DonnesCafe/pseuds/DonnesCafe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John asks Sherlock to be Michael's godfather. A discussion ensues. With tea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In which John and Sherlock discuss a baby, Satan, and Dante

“So, the godfather.”  


John had a sudden hit of déjà vu. He was sitting in the kitchen at Baker Street. Sherlock was standing over a flask of reddish-brown liquid which bubbled over a Bunsen burner. Same beige-brown-mushroom dressing gown. No eye in hand this time, though. Whatever was in the flask smelled hideous. John coughed.  


“Ah, the godfather.” Sherlock turned off the burner. This might be a protracted conversation, and the reagent couldn’t take the heat. He wondered if he could.  


“Yes,” said John. And waited.  


And waited. Déjà vu all over again. He laughed. “Getting a bit scary again, Sherlock. Remember last time? Best friend. Person I love. Special day?”  


“You know I don’t believe in God, John. The wedding was different. It was in a church of course. There was the vicar. But people do that all the time. Church wedding, fancy-dress, champagne, and there you are. This is… different. Tea?”  


John knew he was stalling. “Sure.”  


Sherlock reached over for another beaker, filled it with water, and turned the Bunsen burner back on.  


“Are you sure that’s clean?”  


Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Fairly certain.” He turned and started rooting around on a high shelf. Good tea pot. Good cups.  


“Where’s the kettle I bought?” Years ago, John had bought a nice copper kettle. Before Moriarty. Before a lot of things.  


“The kettle. Experiment gone wrong, I’m afraid.” Sherlock spooned lapsang souchong into the pot. He turned, took the two steps to the fridge, and took out the milk. He hesitated, opened the top, and sniffed.  


“No milk. Sorry.” He put it back, gracefully turned back to the table, took up the flask with a large pair of laboratory tongs, and poured the now-bubbling water into the pot. The smoky smell of the brewing tea merged with the lingering odor of the reddish-brown beaker off to the side. “Mrs. Hudson usually brings my tea up now. Didn’t think I needed a new kettle just for me.”  


“So. Michael Sherlock.” Sherlock couldn’t repress a smile. “John, I haven’t had a chance to really tell you how…” Moved? Chuffed? Honoured? Suddenly his throat was tight. Hell. He turned to fiddle with the tea. He reached for the strainer and poured.  


John moved in smoothly to cover the pause. “Yeah, actually now it’s Michael Sherlock Scott Watson. Mary said to tell you that the Scott is a present from her. My dad. You. Two of the men I want my son to be like.”  


“I’m… honoured, John,” he said, not looking up. He didn’t take sugar with lapsang, so he couldn’t fiddle with the sugar. He pushed the sugar bowl over to John just in case.  


“Well, I’m just glad you’ll be here when he’s born. When he grows up. Not off in Eastern Europe getting yourself killed.”  


So John had known all along. He had wondered if his little speech on the tarmac had fooled him at all. Apparently not.  


“When’s the due date?”  


“Soon. Next week.”  


Sherlock nodded and sipped his tea. John sipped his tea. Standoff.  


John sighed. “Sherlock, I want you to be his godfather. There’s no-one else I want to ask.”  


“John, I would have to abjure Satan and all his works. Satan doesn’t exist.”  


“Satan... What?”  


“Wait.” Sherlock pushed his chair back and disappeared into the lounge. John sighed and added more sugar to his tea. When Sherlock made tea, which was seldom, it was always too strong. Why was nothing ever simple?  


He came back in, flipping through the pages of a small, chubby black book. “Here. Page sixty-seven.”  


He handed the book over to John, with his finger marking a passage. _Book of Common Prayer_. Why did Sherlock have…. Sherlock jabbed impatiently with his finger. “Satan,” he said.  


John read aloud, “’Celebrant asks the following questions…’ yeah,” he skipped ahead a bit, “’and of the parents and godparents…”  


Ah. “Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?”  


“It’s all nonsense, John. There is no Satan, no God. You know that as well as I do. Wickedness and ‘spiritual forces.’ Please.” His voice was scathing. “Why do you want to have Michael christened? It’s sheer superstition.”  


John closed his eyes. He felt a headache coming on. How to explain this, and to Sherlock of all people? Mary had accepted it as easily as she accepted the church wedding, as just a social ritual with a party attached. But he should have realized that Sherlock would take the “god” in “godfather” too seriously for easy cooperation. He was actually going to have to explain it. Bloody hell. He took a deep breath.  


“Look, Sherlock.” He opened his eyes and met Sherlock’s cool, steady, blue-grey-green gaze. “I died,” he blurted.  


The eyes blinked. “What?”  


This wasn’t exactly what he had meant to say. In for a penny, he thought. “Remember the Pink Lady?”  


Sherlock nodded. “Remember you asked me if someone had murdered me, if I were dying, what would be the last thing I said… or thought… or something like that?”  


“Oh, God, let me live,” Sherlock quoted. “I remember.”  


“Yes,” said John, “exactly. That’s what I thought. But then I died.” Sherlock opened his mouth, but nothing came out. John plowed ahead. “I died. I’ve never told anyone this before. Not Mary, not anyone. I mean, I’m obviously alive now…” He laughed and took another swig of tea, now cooling and still too strong.  


“Anyhow. You know I took a bullet to the shoulder. I was at a field hospital, outside doing triage on a helicopter full of wounded. Sniper got me. Bullet nicked the left subclavian artery.” He kept his eyes down, fixed on his cup. He started turning it around and around on the table to keep his hands from shaking. “Even though I was at a hospital, I was only one of two doctors, and there were a lot of wounded. I almost bled out. Flatlined.”  


He looked up. Sherlock was looking at him intently, his mouth a straight line, eyes narrowed.  


“I was… dead. For several minutes.”  


“John,” Sherlock’s voice sounded strange in his own ears. John had almost died. Had died. There could have been no John. Oh God. But he didn’t believe in God. He cleared his throat. “Bright light? Tunnel? Angel choirs?” He had meant to say it lightly, but it came out…. shaky.  


John smiled. That was good. Reassuring. Sherlock suddenly took a large gulp of tea. Cold. Too strong. He coughed.  


“No angel choirs. No tunnel. In fact, my life didn’t pass before my eyes, contrary to popular report." He shrugged and took another sip of tea. "I’m not religious. Never was. Family wasn’t. I always vaguely believed in a creator of some sort. A cause…”  


“Big Bang,” Sherlock interrupted.  


“Yeah, well. Whatever. Didn’t matter much to me one way or the other. But when I died….” This was hard. Christ, he was terrible at this sort of thing.  


“When you died…,” Sherlock said invitingly.  


“I was terrified when I felt the bullet hit me. When I saw how much blood there was, how fast it…. I knew it hit an artery. Then, I couldn’t feel the pain. Couldn’t see. I knew I was dying. And suddenly I wasn’t afraid. I felt….,” He was really, really bad at this sort of thing.  


“You felt…?” Sherlock's voice was soft.  


“Loved. I felt loved.” Sod it. He felt like an idiot. “Look, Sherlock. I know this is going to sound mad. That’s why I never told anyone.”  


He looked up. Inscrutable eyes were fixed intently on him. “John. I am your best friend. I want to know. I promise I won’t…” Suddenly, one of those beautiful, rare smiles lit Sherlock's whole face. “...you know. Be me. I mean, like I usually am.”  


John laughed. “Ok, ok.” Deep breath. “I felt love around me. I was in the middle of something. Let’s just call it ‘It,’ Ok? It saw me. It knew me, and it loved me. It knew everything about me, good, bad, everything. And I knew…. _knew_ at that moment that that was what was most real. About everything. That love.” He looked back down. Didn’t want to see the ridicule in Sherlock’s eyes. He prepared himself to hear something scathing, the sarcastic tone…  


“The love that moves the sun and other stars.” That beautiful voice, soft, just a bit rueful.  


“What?” His eyes flew up. “That’s exactly…. What?”  


“ _'L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stele.'_ 'But already my desire and my will were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed, by the love which moves the sun and the other stars.'"  


“What?” John realized that his mouth was open. What?  


“Hmm. Dante. The _Paradiso_." He waited for John to say something. John didn’t.  


“I did study things at Cambridge other than chemistry, you know.”  


“I would have thought…,” Dante. Sherlock always managed to surprise him. “I would have thought those were the kinds of things you deleted from the hard drive.”  


“That one was too beautiful to delete.” Sherlock looked down again, primly sipping his tea.  


Beautiful? Dante? What? But… John decided to soldier on. “So, long story short. Died, they brought me back, here I am.”  


Not dead. Thank God, thought Sherlock. Not that he believed in God.  


“But I didn’t quite… believe… understand… what I’d experienced. I’m a doctor. I know all the studies about oxygen deprivation and hallucinations. And I’d seen some terrible things in Afghanistan. It just didn’t seem consistent, somehow. Everything seemed pretty bleak, especially when I invalided out.”  


He stopped. How would the next bit ever make sense to Sherlock?  


“But you changed your mind…,” Inviting.  


Of course Sherlock would deduce that. “Yeah, I changed my mind.”  


“Why?”  


Deep breath. “Because I loved _you_. I loved Mary. I love Michael. I loved you… I you…,” His throat threatened to close down. Hell. Sip of tea. Dreadful tea.  


Sherlock had gone very still. “The arrogance…,” John laughed and started again. “The fact that you were an irritating, bloody-minded, arrogant, clueless, egotistical ass never mattered to me..." 

He was interrupted by a snort. 

"Well it didn't matter _that_ much. Wanker. The violin at all hours didn’t matter, the heads in the fridge didn’t matter….”  


“Head, John. It was just the one head." There was something in his voice that made John's heart lift. "How you do exaggerate."  


“Yeah, well… I knew who you were, _what_ you really were under the unimportant stuff, from pretty near the beginning, and I loved you. Just the way I was loved by…. It. Whatever. When Mary shot you, I didn’t know how I would ever forgive her. Or if I could. But then I realized that I could love her that way, too. No matter what. And I know that's how I love Michael, and he isn't even born yet. Look, Sherlock. I don’t know if there’s a God. I think that the people who think they know, don't. One way or the other. But I know there’s love. Love.”  


Sherlock heard the capital letter. Yes, he knew that, too. He felt a painful tightening in his chest. He had, after all, been shot in the chest, so that no doubt accounted for it.  


“Doesn’t really matter to me whether love moves the sun and moon…”

“Stars, John, stars.”

“…or the sodding stars, you ass,” John went on. “Or whether it’s just us. But I know it’s what’s most real. I know there is good and there is evil. So do you. We’ve seen it. It’s not just random. It’s not just neurotransmitters. Magnusson was evil. Moriarty was _evil_.”

“Here be dragons,” muttered Sherlock.  


“What?”  


“Just something my brother said once. He said that I think of myself as St. George slaying dragons.”  


“Bloody right you are,” said John, "absolutely right. You’re good and Magnussen was evil. I want my son’s godfather to be on the side of the angels, even if angels don’t exist.”  


He saw Sherlock wince. “What?”  


“Nothing… nothing.” Sherlock sipped his tea again. "I... try," he said cryptically.  


“I want the best man I know to be my son’s godfather. The christening is my way of saying that I know there is good and evil and love in the world, and I want to always be on the right side of those things for Michael. You don’t have to say anything at the christening. Just stand with me. Be Michael’s godfather.”  


Sherlock nodded.  


John let out a shaky breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.  


He stood up, chair scraping. Motioned Sherlock to stand. He did, puzzled. 

“William Sherlock Scott Holmes, will you love my son?”  


Sherlock cleared his throat. “John, you know I will. Always.”  


“Will you protect him from evil?”  


“’I will, with God’s help,’” So now he was quoting from the prayerbook. John wasn’t even going to begin to analyze that one.  


“Good enough for me,” said John. “Good enough for you?”  


"Yes, John."  


“One question. Just one question…,” Sherlock started.  


“Oh, what now?” asked John.  


“Do I have to wear a tie?”  


John laughed and hugged him.

**Author's Note:**

> continues a series of fics about how things work out after His Last Vow. Life goes on. Moffat and Gattis talk about the fact that one of the things they like to do is put Sherlock down into situations and see what happens. Seems like John was bound to ask Sherlock to be the little one's godfather.... What would he say?


End file.
